Personal-Injury Lawyer Gets Personal About Lawyers Who Sue Him

Eric Turkewitz is a personal-injury lawyer, the kind many Forbes readers would rather see out of business. He writes a popular blog that opposes tort reform and celebrates the power of juries to award his clients tens of thousands or millions of dollars in damages for medical malpractice and other sympathy-inducing personal tragedies.

So just listen to Turkewitz talk about the lawyers who sue him. Twice he’s been hit with lawsuits by people who didn’t like what he wrote in his blog, and he’s furious. Furious at the lawyers who sued him, furious at the legal system that allowed them to keep their cases going long after they should have been dismissed, and furious at judges for failing to sanction the lawyers who cost him so much time and money.

“The failure to sanction leads lawyers to have a much wider safety net than they should have, in that there’s little downside to bringing an idiotic lawsuit,” Turkewitz told me. “They’re not going to get publicly spanked.”

There’s good reason for Katz and Turkewitz to be at odds – Katz does medical exams for insurance companies, and Turkewitz tries to destroy doctors like Katz on the stand so he can get more money for his clients. (In a subsequent note, Turkewitz chided me to say "only sometimes do I vigorously cross-examine doctors" and many times they freely admit what he needs to know.)

But if Katz had a beef, it was with Judge Duane Hart, who accused Katz of committing perjury during a 2013 trial marked by unusual proceedings. Those included the judge’s suggestion that the plaintiff lawyer call his own employee as a witness to contradict Katz’s testimony. The judge repeatedly demanded that Katz state how long an exam of the plaintiff took, then after Katz said 10 to 20 minutes was typical, the plaintiff's lawyer unveiled a surreptitiously recorded video that lasted less than six minutes, leading the judge to call Katz a "no good liar," a "thief” and a "spy" with "little beady eyes.” Judge Hart went on to say he would refer Katz to prosecutors and threatened to end his career as an insurance examiner unless Katz contributed to a settlement, even though the doctor wasn’t a defendant in the case.

Strange proceedings indeed, and the judge never carried through on most of his threats. Turkewitz reported accurately on what happened, in a series of posts that also teed off on insurance doctors who perform “quickie exams that serve only to deny benefits to the injured.”

Katz sued him anyway, in a lawsuit crafted by Jonathan Sullivan of Ruskin Moscou Faltishchek that accused Turkewitz of falsely stating or implying the doctor had committed perjury and had been turned over to the authorities. Turkewitz maintained he reported accurately on the case and the judge hearing the suit against him agreed.

Vindicated, but without getting the public spanking he wanted, or his time and expenses paid for.

“It’s possible somebody not knowledgeble about the law might do this pro se, but somebody who went to law school?” he said. “This is the First Amendment. This is stuff you learn in law school.”

Sullivan didn’t respond to a call for comment.

Turkewitz also got sued for writing about one of the more flamboyant displays of bad lawyering in recent years, the case of a “puppy lawyer” named Joseph Rakofsky who took on a murder case fresh out of law school. For Turkewitz, this lawsuit against him was the equivalent of an after-the-whistle, 15-feet-past-the-sidelines late hit. He merely wrote about a Washington Post article describing Rakofsky’s disastrous maiden effort, which ended when the judge declared a mistrial because of Rakofsky's alleged incompetence including allegedly asking an investigator to “trick” a witness into changing her story. (The private eye went straight to the judge instead.)

“The legal blogosphere lights up about this guy having the audacity to try such a thing,” Turkewitz said, and Rakofsky responded by suing the Post, Turkewitz and practically anybody else who wrote about him.

“Now that he’s done this, what’s the natural thing that happens? People start writing about this idiotic lawsuit,” Turkewitz said, only to find themselves added to the growing list of defendants. Some of the defendants paid to get out of the case, giving Rakofsky the funding to continue his crusade. Along the way, Turkewitz experienced another syndrome the tort-reform crowd dearly wishes to fix.

“It takes a godawful long time to get dismissed,” Turkewitz said of the metastasizing lawsuit, which is technically still on appeal. Again, his motion for sanction was dismissed, as the judge dogmatically adhered to the idea that practically every lawsuit is sacred.

Lest you think Turkewitz is being two-faced when he complains about being on the receiving end of a lawsuit, let me assure you he is consistent on this topic. That’s one reason I read his blog. He calls out shoddy lawyering when he sees it, as well as shady ethical practices like trolling for clients after plane crashes and other tragedies.

Sometimes the most important word a plaintiff lawyer can learn, he said, is no.

“I get prospective cases all the time that are garbage,” he told me. “I say no, no, no, no, yes.”

And then this, which the targets of personal-injury suits may dispute, but is Turkewitz's honest belief: